Archive: July ’09 on The Blog

In case you missed my post back in June, Lima is moving! It’s something we’ve needed to do for a very long time, but kept putting it off. Who would want to move tons (literally) of stones, cz, pearls, and metal? We finally broke down and got a new building…

We’re all very excited and tired. We’ve been going over to the new building after work to get it ready for the big move. Steve, Matt, and I were there until midnight last night painting the conference room and the break room. The owner of the building is also doing a lot of work to prepare it for us. Two more weeks and we should be in! I know what you’re thinking… when is the moving sale??? It’s soon. We’ve been so busy that we haven’t had time to prepare the beads for the move. Once we do that, we’ll know exactly what we want to put on sale. It may come as a ton of first come, first served items, because we have a lot of things with small quantities that we just never ended up selling I’ll keep you posted! Here are some photos of what’s been going on at the new space for the past couple weeks:

Each year on the third Wednesday in July, the Ann Arbor art fair begins. This fair is one of the largest in North America and brings more than 500,000 people through our small town in 4 days. For the past 50 years, Ann Arbor has played host to talented artists from around the globe as well as our own local talent. These artists show a massive body of work, including: beaded, sculpted, and fine jewelry, multi-media to oil paintings, fiber arts, wood, blow glass, photography, clay, furniture, carvings, etc.

I always take a special interest in the jewelry designers. Here are some of the more unique things I noticed this year:

A lot of funky sculptural jewelry

Mixing metals (e.g. silver & gold)

Beach/recycled glass

Stones with more inclusions – normally included stones would be considered lower quality, but when used properly, they offer an unmatched “natural” look.

Encapsulation doming with interesting materials like vintage maps, pebbles. These would make great focals.

I also take a special interest in the way these artists display their work. You can always tell when someone is truly creative – it even extends to their booth design!

Like so many of you, I design and string most of my own jewelry. I’m also not very fond of fine jewelry, which makes it difficult for me (and especially Kevin) to buy jewelry made by someone else. I’m always on the lookout for something that I couldn’t make myself, but also has an artist-designed, unique feel. The art fair is one of the only places I’m able to find something. This year, Kevin and I were walking around and I saw a bracelet that I absolutely loved. He said he didn’t like it and I was sad. I found out later, that he said he didn’t like it so he could sneak back out and buy it for me as a surprise. It’s a silver cuff-style bracelet with flashes of 22k gold and a large fossilized turtle shell in the middle. I definitely couldn’t make it myself and it’s unique It’s by an artist named Elaine Rader (www.elaineraderjewelry.com). I truly love her style.

As a jewelry designer, what kind of jewelry do you buy for yourself? Have you been to many art fairs this summer? What kind of stuff are you seeing?

UPDATE: Wow! We’re sorry to announce that all of the First Come, First Served bead deals are SOLD OUT. Stay tuned to the Fresh Daily for more of these fast-moving deals.

You’re probably aware of this, but we’re in the process of moving to a new office on the other side of town. While we’re anxious to get into a brand new space, we’re more than a little frightened by the idea of moving every single strand of beads that we have on our shelves.

We’re also coming across a few hanks of beads that, for some reason, were never put on the site. You see, they’re all beautiful stones, it’s just there aren’t very many of them. In fact, for one of the products below, we were only able to find 5 strands!

Hello, Fresh Pickers! A while back, I gave you a preview of some work we’re doing here to organize our growing collection of Fresh Picks. While the work isn’t finished yet, we were able to release a small feature that we think will be very helpful in the meantime. As of today, you can search for Fresh Picks by typing in part (or all) of the name in the box on the Fresh Pick Search page. Here’s how it looks:

Searching by Fresh Pick name...

We hope you find this feature useful for when you remember a Fresh Pick’s name, but not when it was created! Here are a couple fun searches to try out:

Here at Lima Beads, we love our pets and we’re always intrigued by the number of Lima customers with a reference to an animal in their screen name or profile photo. Pets are such an important part of our family and lives. You can meet the Lima team pets below and tell us about your pets (include photos!) in the comments.

Meet the Lima Pets

Matt

My wife and I have a Maltese, Minnie, and a dwarf hamster, Sebastian (we call him Sea Bass). Now that we have our own place, Minnie can come live with us again. We’re so happy to have her back. We would try to sneak her in to the apartment every once in a while, but every time we walked out the door, she would bark like crazy. She obviously didn’t understand the consequences!

As for Sea Bass, he loves to run on his wheel. So much so that the constant squeaking was keeping us up at night. After a few applications of olive oil on the plastic axle, I think we’ve finally fixed it.

Kevin & Ali

Ali and I adopted Dakota from The Humane Society 7 years ago. They told us he was 2 years old, but in the first 6 months after we brought him home, he gained 25 pounds. We figure he was more like 6 months! He’s about 8 years old now and still acts like a puppy — endless energy, high-pitched bark, and all. We like to play fetch with the tennis ball to see who gets tired first. It’s always me…

As I mentioned last time, now that we are moving into a new space and starting to pack up all of our belongings, we are finding beads we didn’t even know we had! Ali and I were digging around in the order checkin room last week and we found these great little green vein jasper nuggets. This is an interesting stone. The base is a dijon mustard color and the veins are a forest green color that seem to glow from the inside. This tumbled nugget is one of my favorite shapes too because of its versatility and variation. Each one is different!